Friday, January 3, 2014

Listening to the Founding Fathers

Listening to the Founding Fathers

A political backlash has commenced
within the Republican Party against tea party and libertarian groups
that have limited interest in securing Republican victories and
majorities. Elected leaders, party officials and business groups have
begun pushing back against self-destructive legislative strategies and
unelectable primary candidates.
But the GOP’s political reaction often concedes a great deal of
ideological ground to anti-government populism — what its advocates
describe as “constitutionalism.” Our national recovery, in this view,
depends on returning to the severely constrained governing vision of the
Founding Fathers, as embodied in the Constitution. Many Republicans now
seem to be saying: Yes, this is the conservative ideal, but it is just
not practical to implement at the moment.

Michael Gerson

Gerson writes about politics, religion, foreign policy and global health
and development in a twice-a-week column and on the PostPartisan blog.

This cedes too much. In a new essay in National Affairs, “A Conservative Vision of Government,”
Pete Wehner and I argue that the identification of constitutionalism
with an anti-government ideology is not only politically toxic; it is
historically and philosophically mistaken.
It is not enough to
praise America’s Founders; it is necessary to listen to them. The
Federalist Founders did not view government as a necessary evil. They
referred to the “imbecility” of a weak federal government (in the form
of the Articles of Confederation) compared to a relatively strong
central government, which is what the Constitution actually created.
Though they feared the concentration of too much power in one branch of
government, they believed that good government was essential to promote
what they called the “public good.”
And they assumed that the content of the public good would shift over time. “Constitutions of civil government,” argued Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 34,
“are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but
upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages. . . .
Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of
any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an
estimate of its immediate necessities. There ought to be a CAPACITY to
provide for future contingencies as they may happen.”
In the
tradition of the Federalist Founders, Abraham Lincoln believed the
federal government should be capable of adjusting to changing
circumstances and active in pursuit of national purposes. In his “Fragment on Government,”
Lincoln described a number of matters requiring the “combined action”
of government, including “public roads and highways, public schools,
charities, pauperism” and “providing for the helpless young and
afflicted.”
Conservatives naturally want to be seen as defenders of the
Constitution. But “constitutional conservatives” need to recognize what
both the Federalist Founders and Lincoln actually envisioned for the
republic they respectively created and preserved. Far from being
constrained by the political and economic arrangements of an
18th-century coastal, agrarian republic, the Founders fully expected the
United States to spread across a continent, undergo economic and social
change and emerge as a global actor. And they purposely designed a
constitutional system that could accommodate such ambitions.
This
is not to argue that the Founders would be happy with the current size
and role of government. But, after protecting a variety of essential
civil liberties, they placed such matters mainly in the realm of
democratic self-government. They made it procedurally difficult for
majorities to prevail. But they placed few limits on the public policies
that durable majorities might adopt in the future — leaving “a capacity
to provide for future contingencies.”
In our time, durable
majorities have endorsed the existence of Social Security and Medicare.
These roles of government were not envisioned by the Founders. But they
do not violate a principle of our system nor run counter to the
prescient mind-set of the Founders. People are free to argue for and
against such programs. But this debate can’t be trumped or
short-circuited by simplistic and legalistic appeals to the Constitution
as a purely limiting document.
The broad purposes of the modern
state — promoting equal opportunity, providing for the poor and elderly —
are valid within our constitutional order. But these roles are often
carried out in antiquated, failing systems. The conservative challenge
is to accept a commitment to the public good while providing a
distinctly conservative vision of effective, modest, modern government.
But
a shift in mind-set is first required among conservatives: thinking of
government as a precious national institution in need of care and
reform. This would honor the Founders. The real Founders.